“We defended our goal for our lives”

The Royals’ winning streak continued with a 1-0 win against 10-man Huddersfield Town on Saturday – and that owed a lot to some defensive resolve, explained defender Liam Moore.

Rajiv van la Parra was sent off for two bookable offences before Roy Beerens opened the scoring shortly before the break… the Terriers, who arrived as table-toppers, did get a strong foothold in the game after the break despite their numerical disadvantage and it took a team effort to keep the sheets clean.

“We show what we’re like off the pitch, on the pitch,” explained our summer signing. “We’re all hands on – Yann [Kermorgant] dropped in when he saw that we needed a bit of help to hang on at the end. If that’s what we’ve got to do, that’s what we’ll do.

“We won headers, we went long, we defended the goal for our lives and if we didn’t do it ourselves then Ali [Al-Habsi] was behind us mopping up. I’m really happy – three points and a clean sheet.”

The Terriers threatened right until the final whistle and, on another day, might have snatched an equalising goal.

But Reading ground out their sixth win in seven games to keep the upward momentum going – and that aspect was especially pleasing for the defender.

“The result is the most important thing – we’re in a results business here and we’ve been doing that recently; we’ve been doing very well,” continued Moore. “It was a second half to forget for us – we could have played a bit better, but at the end of the day it’s three points.

“Huddersfield are a very good team. Their manager has gone in there and done very well for them and they are playing good, attacking football. They press well and they caused us problems even with 10 men – credit to them.

“It was nice for us to finish with 11, and the other way around for them to finish with 10! But we’ve shown it ourselves in the last couple of weeks – when we have had 10 men, we still caused problems. It’s not as easy as you think sometimes to play against 10 – they’ve got nothing to lose and they throw more at it, and we get put in that situation where we go a bit backs-to-the-walls a bit, which it can be hard to get out of.

“There’s lessons to be learned, and there will be all season. There are a lot of new players here with a new manager and a new system. But we’ll learn those lessons and at the same time try and pick up results, like we did today.”